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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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“ So many American voters want the NIMBYism”

  • this occurred post WW2 after a great migration and what was termed as “White Flight”. It’s basically impossible at this point to discern whether it occurred because of technology or crime. The urban schools became ghettoized which meant you have to pay private school tuition which meant making a lot of money. Cheap urban living became non-existent.

Is Charlotte a big city? I haven’t lived there in 20 years but I thought it was car-centric sprawl.

Chicago also wasn’t a shithole until posts 2016. They did effective segregation before then so the bulk of the crime was contained to neighborhoods avoided.

14th biggest city in the country.

That doesn’t mean anything in the US. Houston is the 4th largest city. Zero walkable neighborhoods. It’s one giant suburb.

Well yeah, people in Houston and Charlotte don't want much walkable neighborhoods. If they did, they wouldn't constantly vote against dense construction and bike lanes and the like.

My initial comment was that diversity and immigration are bad. Yes people in America vote against dense construction. People do NOT like living in diverse dense neighborhoods. They don’t like living next to black people.

Yet homogenous societies live in dense neighborhoods. Buenos Aires where they literally genocide blacks and Indians is dense and walkable. European cities are dense and walkable. Chinese cities are dense and walkable. Tokyo is dense and walkable.

So yes you prove my point. People do not like living in diverse societies. When people are in homogenous societies they suddenly choose to live close to each other.

Buenos Aires where they literally genocide blacks and Indians is dense and walkable. European cities are dense and walkable. Chinese cities are dense and walkable. Tokyo is dense and walkable.

A lot of these are either from historic choices, lack of land, and/or poverty. Europe is consumed with NIMBYism too, they're worse than the US now in many parts! Hong Kong has long been a NIMBY hub.

But it would be a mistake to infer that the territory’s housing shortages are because there is no more space in between the mountains. Like in nearly every country, Hong Kong’s problems ultimately derive from uncertain property rights regimes that do not let those who would benefit from development trade with those who have the power for it to be blocked.

Am I supposed to believe this is from racial tensions?.

Hong Kong has like 100 km^2 of land according to your own article that isn’t turned into condo towers. Yes cities still like to have some parks. Plus the article explains there are property right issues.

“Europe now has NIMBY”

  • Europe just let in a lot of third world brown people.

I will agree urbanism has multi-factor analysis. People don’t want to live in Coruscant style cities. But diversity seems to be a very good predictor of a countries urbanism.

Plus the article explains there are property right issues.

Yes, that is literally the exact mechanism in which NIMBYism functions in basically every country.

“Europe now has NIMBY”

Europe just let in a lot of third world brown people.

NIMBYist personality isn't new in Europe, great piece out recently on how that got overcame for a while and they were actually able to do stuff. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-abolishing-the-stakeholder-state-caused-the-industrial-revolution/

The YIMBY vs NIMBY fight has been an ancient battle.

Pre-diversity or in the US The Great Migration when was urbanism an issue? The Southside of Chicago was thriving before blacks moved in. And now it’s a ghetto.

You can literally buy a 4k sq ft mansion there a few blocks from University of Chicago but it’s dirt cheap because blacks live there.